The Enterprise wants a state income tax. (April 29 editorial, “Time has come for a state income tax”).
The current system is heavily dependent on “sales and gross receipts taxes,” but, “when times get hard people scale back, living frugally and saving their money. The state loses a vital source of revenue, forcing officials to make hard decisions about what to cut and what to keep.”
Consider what that says. While people are forced by larger macroeconomic forces to “make hard decisions,” it is somehow more difficult for government to make frugality a priority. Their need for our money is apparently more important than our own. So income tax fans need a line of reasoning that can get our money to the government, no matter how much less of it we have.
It’s a shell game, folks. It isn’t a new tax system they want; it’s more money. If the system change were revenue neutral as proponents always claim, the need for hard decisions during tough times would be the same. Moreover, if the lack of an income tax were the real problem, the budgets of California, New York and New Jersey wouldn’t currently be in economic shambles. They all rely heavily on an income tax.
It isn’t the form of taxation which starving state governments, including our own, have in common. It is a gap between what legislators have promised and what tax receipts will pay for. So let’s make government’s first response be to “scale back, live frugally and save their (our) money.” Yeah, right.
Leonard French
Mountlake Terrace
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